Interested in nature with a focus on birding and astronomy. Current project is a visual hunt for novae or exploding stars in the Galaxy from New York City. Got hooked on discovering things while birding and found that the hunt for novae in NYC is right up my alley.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Observation after creating object list: Juno at mag. 7.6 was spotted on 18-Dec in binoculars to double check my conversions of the elements for Planetarium for the Palm (PftP). The charting of Juno was off by 11'44". The orbital elements for Juno supplied by A. Hofer (developer of Planetarium for the Palm) matched the location of Juno closely as seen in a mounted pair of Fujinon 10x70's. Unfortunately the previous elements I created were off by a ½ day. An updated file containing 2,000 asteroids with corrected & tested elements is now available below.

Since the PDA program Planetarium for the Palm (PftP) didn't have the bright asteroid Vesta in its database I decided to add it. On my way to resolving this issue I found some recently updated orbital elements at Computer Aided Astronomy (CA2). The Julian Date for the elements are 2453700 — November 26th, 2005.

Needless to say I translated the first 2,000 asteroids for PftP and would like to share the file. I've tested the results for 60 of the asteroids by comparing them with the desktop planetarium program SkyMap Pro and results are spot on.

The zip file below holds a file containing all 2,000 asteroids. I will be using the file to select the brighter asteroids that are not currently on the PDA program.

Click on filename to download or alternate click (i.e. right click for righties) and Save Link As...